Vice Check, Aisle Nine

Stephanie Bunbury wanders a supermarket of visual ideas with a fashion photographer turned film director.

IT ISNT hard to spot the fashion photographers eye behind the camera in Cashback, young British director Sean Ellis first feature. He has found actors who are beautiful or striking; they are lit with panache and each shot is composed with an eye for maximum beauty. Ellis even manages to milk a supermarket for visual pleasure, although he admits that cracking the aesthetic potential of the baking goods and tinned vegetable aisle was not easy.

Cashback is an expanded version of Ellis first short film, which was nominated for the Oscars. It concerns art student Ben (played by the winsome Sean Biggerstaff) who, dumped by his girlfriend - who remains something of a blank, although flashbacks certainly emphasise her beauty - finds he can no longer sleep. Seeing an advertisement for night workers at the local supermarket, he thinks stacking shelves would be a good way to fill the empty hours. It is there he finds out the true meaning of boredom.

Ben soon finds distraction, however, exercising his artists eye. Somehow, he finds he can stop time; with a snap of his fingers, everything but him freezes on the spot, allowing him to examine everything at will, from the peas fallen on the floor to the girl bent over the freezer. Mostly he likes to rearrange womens clothes to reveal their bodies. Ever since he was a boy, he tells us in voice-over, when he would watch his parents Swedish au pair walk naked from the bathroom to her bedroom, he has been obsessed with the beauty of the female body. It doesnt take long before he is fixating on Sharon, a surprisingly posh check-out girl (Emilia Fox) who is also, less surprisingly, very beautiful.

The germ of the time-stopping idea came to Ellis when he was first in the thick of fashion photography. Before his career took off, he had a succession of boring jobs including, at the most exquisite end of tedium, presiding as lifeguard at the local pool.

"Sitting and watching people float in liquid was quite excruciatingly boring," he says. "Time just seemed to stand still; I used to be clockwatching all the time, wanting the hours to pass. But then, when I got into photography and was enjoying what I was doing, it seemed there werent enough hours in the day to get done what I wanted to do.

"It was like a parallel life to the one Id had. And it was at this time that I was walking around the supermarket late at night and saw these people stacking shelves, and it reminded me of having a boring job, where you want the hours to speed by.

"I thought it would be an interesting idea to have a character who worked in a supermarket and sped up the hours by imagining time was frozen."

Ellis persuaded the manager of his local supermarket to let him film after hours for four nights, telling him the future of British film rested squarely on his shoulders, and Cashback was born.

Freezing time would seem, in fact, to make it even slower, but it remains an open question whether this is literally whats happening. Ellis was thinking, rather, of the way he could lose the world altogether when he was a child, disappearing into his own thoughts.

"When you are just thinking you are often, in a weird way, oblivious to what is going on in the world. The world is on hold, because you are not involved in it. That was how I saw Ben, really. He imagines the world on pause, but at the same time imagines all the things he wants to think about."

Ellis was one of the hot new names in photography from the late 90s; he shot spreads for magazines Dazed and Confused, The Face, Harpers Bazaar and for Vogue in half a dozen different countries. His favourite fashion shot was a picture of a model in a Stella McCartney dress that was then muddled with water during printing, creating a dreamy, swirling image that was as much Monets Waterlilies as a frock. McCartney loved it, but Ellis found himself becoming more and more frustrated with the constraints of working for clients.

"At the end of the day, its only frocks," he says. "Even shooting for Vogue, it is driven by advertising. OK, you can use this bag and this top because they are advertisers; OK, this is what I have to work with. And I felt I had more to say than just dealing with images, I suppose."

As a boy, he would try to see the foreign films shown late at night on television. "Like I remember the first time Emmanuelle was on television and the Peter Greenaway film A Zed and Two Noughts. There was always this underlying sexuality that was there."

Dennis Potters plays were another influence. "They had a strong sexual current and, being young and, in a sense, impressionable, they had an enormous amount of power on my awakening, I guess. When I made this film I wanted the same things, that provocative sexuality that the British dont do very often and dont do very well when they try, because were not supposed to have sex."

Ellis wanted people to argue about it and he has succeeded: they do. "It was designed to go to the edge, where people would argue about whether what he is doing is right or wrong or, you know, PC. Because I think, in this day and age, the whole PC thing is really strange."

Plenty of people have criticised him for objectifying women although, he says, there are hundreds of films he could name off the top of his head that are much more explicit than Cashback.

"Hes an artist. Hes drawing the female form. In a weird way, you cant get more objectifying than that - thats what arts about. If he were a she, and she was painting the male form, would that be objectification? Its kind of an interesting argument."

Nevertheless, Ellis prudently scheduled the nude women in the supermarket until their final night of shooting there. "And the supermarket management did find out about it and were pretty upset. I got a call the next day saying, I hear you were shooting porn in aisle nine. And I was saying, No. We werent shooting porn. It was art. "

Does he still shop at that supermarket? "I dont, actually," he chuckles.

"I couldnt face it. It is too painful, with too many memories. Now I shop at (another supermarket). Its a little bit like having a love affair. When you break up, you cant see them or spend time with them any more; its over. And the love affair with that supermarket was over."

Not that he is expecting to have another one. "Thats my last supermarket show."

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